Gardening – March 24

Tom Strowlger

@garden_with_tom

The first month of meteorological spring is with us, we can now get excited about our gardens entering the spring gardening season. The green shoots and favourite bulbs are showing themselves off whilst birds sing with real enthusiasm and energy. Our spirits are lifted by daffodils, crocuses, irises and hyacinth surrounding us with their colourful flowers.

March is a changeable weather month, it can bring sunny and milder days but also late frosts and snowfall. We can use any milder days to get into the garden and crack on with jobs. A spring garden is a place of newness and freshness and we should use our time in the garden to dig, plant and sow, as effort this month will pay floral dividends in the gardening months ahead.

The soil is warming up so we will start to see the leafy shoots of perennial plants like peony, lupin, delphinium, foxglove, hollyhock, bergenia and hosta to name but a few. If the month is mild to warm then our resident slugs will start their hungry work, so we need to be aware of their appetite for green shoots. We should protect our plants with a layer of fine sand or eggshells around the base of plants.

If the month remains cold then it’s our last call to prune roses, cut back any overwintered fuchsias by one to two buds, snip off spent hydrangea mop-heads, buddleii and grapevines only if without opening bud. We can cut back old brown foliage of perennials before the green shoots become longer leaves, however we don’t want to cut any new green growth amongst the old branches and leaves.

The lawn will need some work after the long winter, from tidying the border edges to hand sowing grass seed into patches which will make the lawn look refreshed and spring and summer ready. The lawn grass is now actively growing, so if the weather is mild we can give it the first cut of the season on the very highest lawnmower setting. We can hand sow grass seed into bare patches, raking the seed into the soil and then quilting it with a layer of top soil to assist germination. We can use a half moon edging tool or spade to straighten off our lawn edges. These two jobs will make our gardens look neat and tidy ready for the warmer days to come.

We can happily start to sow and grow the annual seeds of our favourite summer flowers including borage, cosmos, cornflower, poppies, foxglove, wild carrot, corncockle, oxeye daisy and many more. We should plant out begonia, lilies, ranunculus, agapanthus, gladioli, freesia and dahlia on milder days, to create a colourful and long lasting flower display for Summer through to the first frost of autumn. What we plant this month will give us so much pleasure on the longer and brighter days of summertime ahead.